Bush and Rice negotiated for over a year to talk her into going back to Pakistan. As far as I'm concerned her blood is on their hands. Gordy, I whole heartily agree with you, this is a great loss to democracy.

I saw no binds tyeing her hands so how can blood be on Bush or Rice it seems to me that some person needs to rethink the country in which he or she lives if you think that American should just let the bullies rule the world.
Grow up and get a life!!!!
This is America the land my grandfather and my father fought for so I could grow up free.
It's a crying shame that a person would want to live in a country he does not respect and even so we still allow you to freedom of speech no matter how ignorant it may sound.
Just my two cents the right I am afforded because AM AMERICAN!
Sandie

I have read your post several times and I STILL don't understand what you are saying. Take a course in "English as a Second Language" so those of us who are native speakers might be able to understand what you are trying to say.

ps There is so much idiomatic (and idiotic) language on this site which demonstrates the failure of American education; AND, most politicians want to pour more money into this black hole. I realize that you needn't be highly eductaed to shoot Trap or to shoot off your mouth but please try to make your posts understandable to more than your horse.

I realize this woman had brought democracy to her country when she got elected, but once elected, she stole from the same poor souls that elected her. I don't understand that part.

Her father once ran the country, robbed them blind, assassinated a rival, was found guilty and was executed. She married into a family that robbed from the country. She was even kicked out of the country for being a thief.

I quess I'm kind of in the dark as to what this women was going to achieve if elected back into her country's gov't.

C&P....

Switzerland
On July 23, 1998, the Swiss Government handed over documents to the government of Pakistan which relate to corruption allegations against Benazir Bhutto and her husband.[19] The documents included a formal charge of money laundering by Swiss authorities against Zardari. The Pakistani government had been conducting a wide-ranging inquiry to account for more than $13.7 million frozen by Swiss authorities in 1997 that was allegedly stashed in banks by Bhutto and her husband. The Pakistani government recently filed criminal charges against Bhutto in an effort to track down an estimated $1.5 billion she and her husband are alleged to have received in a variety of criminal enterprises.[20] The documents suggest that the money Zardari was alleged to have laundered was accessible to Benazir Bhutto and had been used to buy a diamond necklace for over $175,000.[21]

The PPP has responded by flatly denying the charges, suggesting that Swiss authorities have been misled by false evidence provided by Islamabad.

On August 6, 2003, Swiss magistrates found Bhutto and her husband guilty of money laundering.[22] They were given six-month suspended jail terms, fined $50,000 each and were ordered to pay $11 million to the Pakistani government. The six-year trial concluded that Bhutto and Zardari deposited in Swiss accounts $10 million given to them by a Swiss company in exchange for a contract in Pakistan. The couple said they would appeal. The Pakistani investigators say Zardari opened a Citibank account in Geneva in 1995 through which they say he passed some $40 million of the $100 million he received in payoffs from foreign companies doing business in Pakistan.[23]

In October 2007, Daniel Zappelli, chief prosecutor of the canton of Geneva, said he received the conclusions of a money laundering investigation against former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto on Monday, October 29, but it was unclear whether there would be any further legal action against her in Switzerland.[24]

Poland
The Polish Government has given Pakistan 500 pages of documentation relating to corruption allegations against Benazir Bhutto and her husband. These charges are in regard to the purchase of 8,000 tractors in a 1997 deal.[25][26] According to Pakistani officials, the Polish papers contain details of illegal commissions paid by the tractor company in return for agreeing to their contract.[27] It was alleged that the arrangement "skimmed" Rs 103 mn rupees ($2 million) in kickbacks.[28] "The documentary evidence received from Poland confirms the scheme of kickbacks laid out by Asif Zardari and Benazir Bhutto in the name of (the) launching of Awami tractor scheme," APP said. Bhutto and Asif Ali Zardari allegedly received a 7.15% commission on the purchase through their front men, Jens Schlegelmilch and Didier Plantin of Dargal S.A., who received about $1.969 million for supplying 5,900 Ursus tractors.[29]

France
Potentially the most lucrative deal alleged in the documents involved the effort by Dassault Aviation, a French military contractor. French authorities indicated in 1998 that Bhutto's husband, Zardari, offered exclusive rights to Dassault to replace the air force’s fighter jets in exchange for a five percent commission to be paid to a corporation in Switzerland controlled by Zardari.[30]

At the time, French corruption laws forbade bribery of French officials but permitted payoffs to foreign officials, and even made the payoffs tax-deductible in France. However, France changed this law in 2000.[31]

Western Asia
This section does not cite any references or sources.
Please improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed. (December 2007)

In the largest single payment investigators have uncovered, a gold bullion dealer in Western Asia was alleged to have deposited at least $10 million into one of Zardari's accounts after the Bhutto government gave him a monopoly on gold imports that sustained Pakistan's jewellery industry. The money was allegedly deposited into Zardari's Citibank account in Dubai.

Pakistan's Arabian Sea coast, stretching from Karachi to the border with Iran, has long been a gold smugglers' haven. Until the beginning of Bhutto's second term, the trade, running into hundreds of millions of dollars a year, was unregulated, with slivers of gold called biscuits, and larger weights in bullion, carried on planes and boats that travel between the Persian Gulf and the largely unguarded Pakistani coast.

Shortly after Bhutto returned as prime minister in 1993, a Pakistani bullion trader in Dubai, Abdul Razzak Yaqub, proposed a deal: in return for the exclusive right to import gold, Razzak would help the government regularize the trade. In November 1994, Pakistan's Commerce Ministry wrote to Razzak informing him that he had been granted a license that made him, for at least the next two years, Pakistan's sole authorized gold importer. In an interview in his office in Dubai, Razzak acknowledged that he had used the license to import more than $500 million in gold into Pakistan, and that he had travelled to Islamabad several times to meet with Bhutto and Zardari. But he denied that there had been any corruption or secret deals. "I have not paid a single cent to Zardari," he said.

Razzak claims that someone in Pakistan who wished to destroy his reputation had contrived to have his company wrongly identified as the depositor. "Somebody in the bank has cooperated with my enemies to make false documents," he said.

Trapitude...."Just my 2 cents worth the right I am afforded because AM AMERICAN".

In your opinion I have to rethink the county I live in because my opinion does't agree with yours. I am grown up and have a life, maybe you ought to try it!!!!! You will find not everyone thinks like you, thank god.

Bill

P.S. My grandfather,father,uncles and cousins all fought for this country so you can have your opinion also. Use it wisely.

I deplore her death and the resulting chaos in Pakistan BUT she went there voluntarily, to an area that had murdered her father and where threats had been made against her and where attempts had been made on the current president's life. Sorry I can't see her as the savior of the country, if not the world, as does the previous poster. In her previous terms as prime minister she was known to be very autocratic and her administrations were rampant in corruption. If she were alive and elected I doubt seriously that WE in the US would be any safer. .....JIm G
PS: and if the best response to this is that I'm uneducated, don't bother, or go ahead and reveal your own contempt for the opinions of others. J

There are lessons to be learned from the dazzling success of the surge strategy in Iraq.

Lesson one is that just about no mission is impossible for the United States military. A year ago it was widely thought, not just by the new Democratic leaders in Congress but also in many parts of the Pentagon, that containing the violence in Iraq was impossible. Now we have seen it done.

We have seen this before in American history. George Washington's forces seemed on the brink of defeat many times in the agonizing years before Yorktown. Abraham Lincoln's generals seemed so unsuccessful in the Civil War that in August 1864 it was widely believed he would be defeated for re-election. But finally Lincoln found the right generals. Sherman took Atlanta and marched to the sea; Grant pressed forward in Virginia.

Franklin Roosevelt picked the right generals and admirals from the start in World War II, but the first years of the war were filled with errors and mistakes. Even Vietnam is not necessarily a counterexample. As Lewis Sorley argues persuasively in "A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam," Gen. Creighton Abrams came up with a winning strategy by 1972. South Vietnam fell three years later when the North Vietnamese army attacked en masse, and Congress refused to allow the aid the U.S. had promised.

George W. Bush, like Lincoln, took his time finding the right generals. But it's clear now that the forward-moving surge strategy devised by Gens. David Petraeus and Raymond Odierno has succeeded where the stand-aside strategy employed by their predecessors failed. American troops are surely the most capable military force in history. They just need to be given the right orders.

Lesson two is that societies can more easily be transformed from the bottom up than from the top down. Bush's critics are still concentrating on the failure of the central Iraqi government to reach agreement on important issues -- even though the oil revenues are already being distributed to the provinces. We persuaded the Iraqis to elect their parliament from national party lists (reportedly so that it would include more women) rather than to elect them from single-member districts that would have elected community leaders more in touch with local opinion.

But the impetus for change has come from the bottom up, from tribal sheiks in Anbar province who got tired of the violence and oppression of al Qaeda in Iraq, from Shiites and Sunnis who, once confident of the protection of American forces and of the new Iraqi military, decided to quit killing each other. They did not wait for orders from Baghdad or for legislation to be passed with all the i's dotted and t's crossed.

Our own recent history should have taught us that bottom-up transformation, in local laboratories of reform, can often achieve results that seemed impossible to national leaders. At the beginning of the 1990s we seemed to have intractable problems of high crime and welfare dependency. Experts argued that we couldn't hope for improvement. But state and local leaders got to work and showed that change for the better was possible. They included Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson on welfare and New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani on crime control and many others, mostly Republicans but many Democrats as well. The federal government came charging in only after success was achieved in states and cities across the country. By now welfare dependency and crime have fallen by more than half, and they have virtually disappeared as political issues.

Lesson three is that it doesn't pay to bet against America. As Walter Russell Mead explains in his trenchant (and entertaining) "God and Gold: Britain and America and the Making of the Modern World," first Britain and then America have built the most prosperous and creative economies the world has ever seen and have prevailed in every major military conflict (except when they fought each other) since the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Many of those victories have been achieved in conflicts far more grueling than what we have faced in Iraq.

Some of George W. Bush's critics seem to have relished the prospect of American defeat and some refuse to acknowledge the success that has been achieved. But it appears that they have "misunderestimated" him once again, and have "misunderestimated" the competence of the American military and of free peoples working from the bottom up to transform their societies for the better. It's something to be thankful for as the new year begins.

Michael Barone is a senior writer with U.S. News & World Report and the principal co-author of The Almanac of American Politics, published by National Journal every two years. He is also author of Our Country: The Shaping of America from Roosevelt to Reagan, The New Americans: How the Melting Pot Can Work Again, the just-released Hard America, Soft America: Competition vs. Coddling and the Competition for the Nation's Future."

She was far from democratic. Closer to a strong arm dictator who was very currupt. She exiled to avoid prosicution. In Oct 2007 she was pardoned and only then did she return to Pakistan. I think the whole thing was fake. Did anyone see her body? Why did her family refuse an autopsy? She complained that she was not getting enough protection and then rode in a car with her body sicking through a moon roof in a crownd of thousands of people, come on.

Gordon..first learn how to spell...secondly...........................back to my comment one more time I commented on your remark that Condie Rice and George Bush have blood on there hands.
Your liveing proof that a 5th grade education does wonders for some!!!
I bet you might even wanna run for President Yourself hahahahah!
Sandie

She was acussed of corruption by WHO? A fudamentalist extremist Islamic Regeim??!!! Yea I'd really trust THEM to be fair and balanced! I'm not saying her party was squeaky clean, but the fact is NO Islmic extremist party is EVER going to tolerate a woman running ANY phase of government. REMEMBER NO hard line Islamic government will EVER be any kind of democracy! Her father was hanged by the same hard line Islamist party she opposed. She was pro western and would have been far better for the U.S. that the party in control now. My guess is the current rulers had her killed because they feared they would lose power. The whole place is a mess and I seriously doubt that that it will ever be much better. As far a Bush and Rice being RESPONSIBLE for her death, you Bush haters with "Bush Derangement Syndrome" need to get professional help! She knew the risk involved in returning, and took them of ger on free will. Just another Islamic third world black hole like so many others. The majority of these people are stuck between the stone age and first century B.C. Not likely to get better anytime soon!